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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us March 16, 2005 The Bush news team is hard at work As the New York Times reported in Sunday's front page article, the practice of using paid "news" reports by the Bush Administration is increasing at a rapid rate. Call it what it is: propaganda disguised as news. It's not a new practice. Television networks have been doing "news" reports tied to its primetime television shows for years. The Clinton administration first ventured into the realm of producing its own "news" segments. But this practice is now epidemic - the Bush Administration, according to Ivins, spent $254 million on the practice in its first term - as the line between advertising and news was not just blurred, but kicked away with a dusty poof of sand. Left undeterred, the cost is enormous. Media agencies of all stripes are increasingly cast together in miry bog of declining credibility, while the discerning public will find the ability to find reasonable and unbiased news sources harder to choose than winning numbers on a Megabucks ticket. Nationally, the practice can be summed up in a paragraph from the New York Times article: "It's the kind of TV coverage every president covets. "'Thank you, Bush. Thank you U.S.A.,' a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City ... "To a viewer, [the] report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced [it]." Consider this for just a moment. You, Jane Taxpayer, are funding the Bush administration to produce propaganda clips and provide them to news agencies, who agree to run them as if they were locally produced news. You, Joe Taxpayer, are paying a columnist to write a pro-Bush story. Not only are the people we vote into office making the news, they are now trying to report it, and if that doesn't work just go out and buy it. We observe this constant blurring line locally as well. More and more we hear the cry that as a "community newspaper" we should ... fill in the blanks here. Whatever people want, from free advertising to squelching a particular story to promoting a certain agenda or religion, they often begin with a sense of entitlement that somehow they are owed the right to put something in the newspaper. A free and independent press is beholden to no group and should work to serve one and only one group: its readers. Because those readers vary wildly from topic to topic, event to event, as to what they want, trained professional journalists need to work increasingly harder to do one thing well: tell the story. We try not to worry about changing the world, believing at our core that our job is to report the world and let those reports do what they will in changing the world. We can only wish that more people learn to value that while turning a discerning eye at the practice of "news" reporting by government employees. DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Online Pharmacy Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations Hammocks Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams